Tig Notaro’s twin sons weren’t aware that their mothers were gay until recently.
During a 4 June episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the 53-year-old Star Trek actor revealed how her 7-year-old twin sons Max and Finn finally found out that their parents were gay. After Colbert asked the actor how her Pride Month was going so far, Notaro regaled him with the hilarious story.
At the time, Notaro and her wife Stephanie Allynne discovered that they hadn’t made the connection until one morning when the family of four was driving to school together.
“Their school is six minutes away from our house, and at minute three we were in the front seat of the car talking about something gay,” she recalled. “Our son Finn leans forward and says, ‘You’re gay?’”
“I was so stunned because we’ve lived together almost eight years, and I’ve been gay the whole time — even prior!” she joked. “So, I was like ‘Yes! We are.’ I was so shocked.”
As they expected, Notaro noted that it wasn’t an easy conversation, “We’re like three minutes now from the school, and I start explaining what gay is. And then while I was explaining it, I started getting insecure, thinking, what if he doesn’t like this?”
But when she asked her sons one simple question, any worries she had went away.
“What do you think about what I just told you?” she asked her sons, to which Finn replied: “Oh I love my family.”
After the pair dropped their sons off at school, Notaro and Allyne began to speculate how their sons didn’t know their mothers were gay. Notaro recounted, “We drop them off at school and we’re like, ‘bye!’ and we truly drove off going like half-a-mile-an-hour, like ‘How on earth do our kids not know we’re gay?’ Because, dare I say, we’re also an iconic gay couple.”
She added, “I realized that even though there’s pictures of our wedding day and they know they have two moms, that doesn’t mean they know what gay is.”
This isn’t the first time Notaro’s sons have caught her off guard, with the comedian admitting on Live with Kelly and Mark, that the first time her sons watched one of her standup shows, they “heckled” her.
“They heckled me. They weren’t meaning to heckle me. They were fact-checking,” Notaro joked to hosts and longtime couple, Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos. “They didn’t think I was telling the truth. And so my son Max was just sitting there and he said, ‘Yeah right!’”
The hosts laughed, and Notaro pointed out that the audience did the exact same thing.
“And that’s what the audience did! And he was like, ‘That’s not true,’ “ Notaro shared. “And I started laughing and I was like, ‘I’m sorry, my kids are here and they’ve never seen me do stand-up.’ That was recent!”
Notaro and Allyne tied the knot in October 2015 in Notaro’s hometown, Pass Christian, Mississippi, with a star-studded guest list including Sarah Silverman, Alicia Silverstone, Lake Bell, and more. They welcomed their twin boys via a surrogate on June 26, 2016.
